Assassinating Democracy – by Bart Stinson

I missed an anniversary ceremony by a few hours. It was a small turnout, and somebody blew Taps on a bugle, according to a chatty visitor from Delaware. He comes to the decennial observances, and to a few off-year gatherings. He said nearly 10,000 people showed up for the 30-year anniversary in 1993, the year after the JFK movie came out.

It’s hard to imagine an America in which most people don’t care about the JFK assassination anymore, but no imagination is required. Just look around. We have been outwaited.

Kennedy was almost certainly a victim of the Deep State. The FBI botched the investigation so badly, it could not have been accidental. Assassin Lee Harvey Oswald left a note at the FBI office in Dallas for an agent he knew. The Bureau not only destroyed the note, but expunged the FBI agent’s name from Oswald’s address book before turning a sanitized “transcript” over to the presidential “Warren” Commission.

This was consistent with the Bureau’s marching orders from the Department of Justice, composed just hours after Oswald was gunned down in police custody. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach proposed a clean bill of health from the FBI in a memo he sent to Peace Corps Deputy Director Bill Moyers (yes, that Bill Moyers) almost before the corpses were cold. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy had apparently lost control of his department, as his subordinates were already acting with great autonomy.

“The public must be satisfied,” Katzenbach wrote Moyers, “that Oswald was the assassin; that he did not have confederates who are still at large; and that the evidence was such that he would have been convicted at trial.” Check. Katzenbach was also the first to propose a blue-ribbon presidential commission to investigate and report its findings on the assassination.

Declassified documents establish that the CIA directed its officers to withhold active cooperation from the Warren Commission. The Commission never learned, for example, of the CIA’s previous contacts with Oswald.

The Commission’s own chairman, Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, forbade the questioning of witnesses in Mexico who knew Oswald.

The FBI had an informant, future president Gerald Ford, on the inside. Ford kept the FBI apprised of the Commission’s internal deliberations, and identified two fellow Commissioners who doubted that the kill shot was fired from the Texas Book Depository.

Warren denied fellow commissioners access to photographs from the president’s autopsy, based on his opinion that they were too disturbing. This is especially troubling because Secret Service ruffians menaced Dallas medical examiner Earl Rose when he insisted, in accordance with Texas law, on conducting an autopsy on the president’s body. There was, therefore, no independent autopsy, and the federal government’s autopsy was never subjected to Warren Commission scrutiny.

Kennedy’s body was flown back east to a Maryland suburb of Washington DC where Navy clinical pathologists with no background in forensic pathology conducted the best autopsy they knew how. They did not even shave the areas around the bullet holes. There’s no reason to suspect them of a cover-up, but there’s abundant suspicion that the Deep State orchestrated a crude and inconclusive autopsy by neophytes.

The CIA’s official in-house historian has conceded that the Agency managed the flow of evidence to guide the Warren Commission to its single-shooter conclusion. Not only did Oswald act alone and unconnected to any conspirators, then, but so did Jack Ruby, who killed Oswald in police custody, two days after the Kennedy assassination.

Nobody hectored us to “trust the science,” but it was implicit as the Warren Commission marshalled authoritative scientific opinion to convince us we didn’t see what we thought we saw. Any country boy who’s shot a tin can off a fence post, of course, is doubtful that a shooter on the sixth floor of a building behind and slightly uphill from the president could shoot him on a trajectory that snaps his head backward.

The Deep State gaslighting machine went into overdrive, ridiculing skeptics as “conspiracy theorists,” and producing experts to tell us Kennedy’s head snapped backward due to a nerve response or, in the alternative, that it actually snapped forward before it ricocheted backward.

The Navy pathologists reported a hole in the side of the president’s head about four times as large as the Dallas emergency room surgeons reported. The large hole would indicate a shot from behind, from the Texas Book Depository. The smaller hole would be consistent with an entry wound from a shot fired from the grassy knoll. Evidence of entry wounds, the condition of a recovered bullet and theorized exit paths with no discernable physical traces didn’t add up.

It was necessary to the Commission’s lone-gunman theory that there be only three shots. Oswald’s rifle could not fire four shots quickly enough to fit the elapsed time. And so three shots it was. Here were solemn men of high reputation looking us in the eye, speaking outlandish ballistic theories and fudged pathology with straight faces.

The Cult of the Expert is so powerful in America, whether it’s Dr. Spock, Dr. Kinsey or Dr. Fauci, that otherwise intelligent people can be persuaded to doubt their own clear observations. Aristotle described the persuasive technique as “ethos,” an appeal to prestige and affiliation rather than logic.

But the Zapruder film was powerful, too. We weren’t allowed to see it in its entirety until 1975, but it convinced most of us that the kill shot to JFK’s head came from the front and right, not from behind.

The JFK assassination was the first time it occurred to me, at age nine, that we might not be allowed to have a president we voted for. Democracy was on a winning streak at mid-century. I had never thought about the ways that domestic enemies, people who look and sound like us, might deprive us of self-government, overturning election results even among the Greatest Generation.

Kennedy made a lot of enemies, and there was no shortage of people in and out of the government who wished him ill. Whatever the merits of their grievances against him, their contempt for the Greatest Generation’s right to govern itself was unwarranted.

This was a generation that had rescued democracy from fascists and murderous ethnic fanatics, at great sacrifice. It had confronted militant Communism. It had empowered and facilitated decolonization and self-rule in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean. The Greatest Generation did not deserve to have its own democratic choices overruled.

A large fraction of Democrats were inconsolable. The next generation of presidential politics could be described as an ongoing tantrum against every man not named Kennedy who had the nerve to occupy the White House: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter felt the wrath and the treachery of Kennedy Democrats, including some who became Neocon Republicans. But they died off, and the Deep State has absorbed their spawn into the system.

It’s disputable whether our own generation deserves self-government. We have a mixed record. But I think most of us Baby Boomers agree that our children and grandchildren deserve to receive what the Greatest Generation intended for them. And so our country and our sovereignty are worth fighting for.

Once again, permanent elites have substituted their judgment for ours. For our own good, they reason, we can’t be allowed to elect the president we voted for. News interns all across the social and mainstream media, including no-name “fact checkers,” assure us that Trump’s claims of election fraud are “baseless.”

But we know what we saw. Republican poll-watchers were prevented from observing the ballots up close in Michigan and Pennsylvania. In Michigan, some were shut out of the state’s main vote-count building altogether. Postal supervisors directed employees to backdate mailed-in ballots in Wisconsin. Judges interfered without Constitutional authority to loosen the rules and deadlines regarding mail-in votes. Pennsylvania’s ballot rejection rates for those mailed-in ballots dropped by 97% after election officials adjusted signature verification software below factory settings. Anomalous 97% and 100% Biden batches showed up after ballot counting was interrupted in multiple states overnight.

The pattern in the critical swing states was that Trump built leads in each of them until voting was interrupted, poll-watchers were dismissed or obstructed, and new ballots arrived to vault Biden into insurmountable leads. There’s nothing inherently corrupt about a comeback win, of course, and everybody expected Democrats to do better than Republicans in mail-in votes. But despite the highest total vote in presidential election history, oddly, Biden had no down-ticket coat tails. Republicans held the Senate until last week, and almost flipped the House. That would suggest that Biden’s good fortune after the resumption of counting was not the result of a surge of Democrat mail-in votes. These overnight votes were uniquely devoted to Biden, not to other Democrats. Do the vote-counting software vendors charge extra for coat tails?

The problem for most Americans is not a lack of evidence, but a monotonous overabundance of it. There is so much evidence of election fraud in the six decisive “swing” states, involving so many state and local officials we used to respect, we despair of ever digesting it. To confront such pervasive corruption and negligence will require stamina, courage and thick skin, and we’re not sure we’re up to it. The straight-faced denials in the mainstream media are